How NOT to respond to feedback (Part 5)

 

(Continued from Previous Post)

 

Up to this point, we’ve seen an example of how a larger company, Flickr in this case, handled a concern I had about not being able to post photos using my account.

It’s important to note that another service, TypePad, which supports both “How to bootstrap your business” and the PostRanger network, was much quicker to respond, even though the problem was certainly not theirs.

I got a message from helpful *ginevra, community manager for Six Apart, the company that created TypePad, assuring me: let me know if you're still having TypePad issues - we're happy to help out. :)

However, after the last series of messages from Flickr, I heard nothing more for at least seven days after which I tried restating the same request for help and got pretty much the same set of responses I got earlier, from a different customer representative.

Now there’s a couple of points to make about all this:

• While TypePad is a paid service, my Flickr account is free
• Certainly I can understand that a company being paid to provide a service might be more responsive than one that is not
• Flickr is part of Yahoo! which I understand has experienced some problems with the economic downturn.

However…

·        Flickr, like TypePad, is marketing as much a community as a service and plenty of other free communities (Yahoo!’s own MyBlogLog, for example) are much more responsive even with their nonpaying users

·        The users are part of the community’s success and clearly without them there would be no community, so allowing them to become frustrated and decide not to use the product or service is clearly not in the company’s best interest.

(Continued Next Post)

Comments

[Ginevra]

that's weird - and frustrating for you to not get the answer you need! Would you send me over the last response you got frlmo our support team (it's got the ticket number somewhere in it so's I can track it down) and then we'll get you sorted out from there.